Michael Moore says the US is not broke: all “we the people” need to do is take the money back from the fat cat billionaires. What if we took this advice? Let’s imagine expropriating some of the wealth of the richest man in America, William Gates III. Forbes says he’s worth about $54 billion, of […]
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If We Took Michael Moore’s Advice
09-Mar-11Lent 2011
09-Mar-11Let’s get Lenten! Woo! I’m pumped for self-denial! Yahoo!
New Kinds of Taxes
04-Mar-11Kling: “One point about the Great Substitution of leisure for work is that leisure escapes taxation. That raises all sorts of issues. ” Non-consumption tax. Video game tax. Sitting around tax. Doing nothing tax. Mental activity tax. Oh wait, that last one is basically thoughtcrime. What, did the US suddenly get Canada envy?
I hadn’t encountered this before: Place-Manner-Time vs. Time-Manner-Place languages, an attribute of the ordering of adpositional phrases. Examples from Wikipedia: English (PMT): I’m traveling to Munich by car today. German (TMP): Ich fahre heute mit dem Auto nach München. Japanese, which I’m trying to learn, is a TMP language like German. French and Finnish, which […]
No Woman No Cry: You’re Parsing it Wrong
04-Mar-11It doesn’t mean “If you don’t have a woman, you won’t have to cry”. Which really seemed like the most sensible reading to me.
In Case You Needed A New Time-Waster
04-Mar-11At wals.info, compare linguistic features by geography (e.g.,: when do ordinal numbers become productive? first second three+th vs. first, two+th, three+th).
New goal: Post here instead of Facebook
03-Mar-11I’ve been posting to Facebook more than I’d like to; so I’m going to try to turn that into more short blog posts with less editing/polish.
Cinematic Dream
03-Mar-11Dream logs are fundamentally uninteresting to anybody but the dreamer.
Ask Boxer
06-Oct-10Eric Scheie asks Boxer the horse, “What’s the glue that holds society together?“: Is work personal and individualistic, or is it social and based on what’s good for the community as a whole? And most important, what is work? […] After all, we don’t want to end up being like Boxer the horse. Say what you […]
The Real World
01-Oct-10Peter Boothe asks twitter— Why do we hold Internet security systems to a high standard that no offline system has ever met? But it’s not so much that the standard is higher as that it’s different. Â Counterfeiting and theft are risks for physical currency that don’t even make sense for some forms of electronic payments. […]